Her training up to that point had taught her prevention protocols against unhealthy behaviors such as smoking, but what could she say to the stabbed and wounded patients, often young African-American men, she stitched up and sent back to the most violent of Boston’s neighborhoods?

"My personal experience caused me to question the inevitability of violence and the neglect of a major health problem for young black men," she said.

Now professor of public health practice and associate dean for faculty development at HSPH, Prothrow-Stith has co-authored a book with Howard Spivak, chief of the Division of General Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and vice president for community health programs at New England Medical Center. Murder Is No Accident: Understanding and Preventing Youth Violence in America demonstrates how a research-based interdisciplinary approach to violence prevention can work.

The authors draw on their experiences as prominent public health figures in Boston during a time when the city was hit by a growing epidemic of youth violence that started in the early 1980s. Physicians and educators, Prothrow-Stith and Spivak started the Boston Violence Prevention Program in 1982, which collected violence data and case studies from around the city. That information was then disseminated to local communities so that neighborhood leaders could organize violence prevention efforts. The effort was the first community-based public health violence prevention program in the nation. Later, Prothrow-Stith was appointed the youngest-ever Massachusetts Commissioner of Public Health and was responsible for establishing the first Office of Violence Prevention in a Department of Public Health. Working with Prothrow-Stith, Spivak helped develop the Office.

Their work could not have come at a better time. By the early 1990s, Boston was witnessing one juvenile homicide nearly every month. In response, Prothrow-Stith and Spivak were tapped to be part of a broad-based coalition that included leaders in government, education, health, law enforcement, religion, civic life and business. Their collective work was to become known as the "Boston Model." By the mid to late 1990s, the city had gone almost three years without a single juvenile homicide.

"No one part of the community is responsible for this problem [of violence]," write Prothrow-Stith and Spivak in their book. "No one part can fix it. We are all in this together."

In Murder Is No Accident, the authors describe the Boston Model as well as discuss factors that affect youth violence, such as poverty and domestic violence, and the means for its prevention, such as conflict resolution programs. They add their own insights based on years of dealing with adolescents as physicians, public health professionals and parents, while including accounts by other individuals directly involved in prevention programs.

Their most basic message is: violence is not inevitable but eminently preventable.

Published by Jossey-Bass Books, Murder Is No Accident is now in bookstores.